The two-day Senate confirmation hearing for William Barr, President Trump’s nominee for the vacant Attorney General post, concluded on Jan. 16 with the curious incident involving the nominee’s early career in the CIA and equally strange incident of his role in obtaining pardons in 1992 for fellow Republicans convicted of crimes in the Iran-Contra national security scandal.
Barr is shown at left in a screengrab from the hearing, with his wife at top right.
Remarkably, no one apparently raised (at least in depth) the nominee’s CIA background and his role facilitating pardons while he served as attorney general during the presidency of George H. W. Bush.
That’s this reporter’s recollection after attending part of the hearing, watching much of the rest cable television. An expert law professor afterward told me that he had watched the entire hearing and neither topic was mentioned by anyone.
Let’s invoke the famous Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” to reflect on why what we can call the "curious incident" of the omissions might be important in Barr's confirmation proceeding.
It's one of the most popular Sherlock Holmes detective stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. "Silver Blaze" describes s the apparent murder of the trainer of a successful race horse, Silver Blaze (shown in an 1892 illustration by Sidney Paget), and the horse's disappearance on the eve of an important race.
“The tale is distinguished by its atmospheric setting in 19th Century England and the late-Victorian sporting milieu,” according to the Wikipedia entry from which this summary is excerpted, including in language below:.
The story also features some of Conan Doyle's most effective plotting, hinging on the "curious incident of the dog in the night-time" that Holmes, a private detective, raises with Scotland Yard’s official detective Gregory:
Detective Gregory: "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
Holmes: "That was the curious incident."
In the matter at hand:
William Barr kick-started his professional career with three years’ work from 1973 to 1978 for the CIA while he attended the George Washington University's School of Law. This was a period of intense change for the agency following devastating disclosures of major scandals in the post-Watergate era.
Vice President George H. W. Bush had been CIA director for about a year beginning in 1976 in the Republican Ford administration until the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1977.
Following a judicial clerkship, meanwhile, Barr went on to serve in a number of Justice Department posts in the Reagan-Bush administration, beginning in 1981.
Under President Bush (shown in an official photo), Barr heled progressively higher Justice Department positions. He became Deputy Attorney general in 1990. Barr served as Bush's second attorney general beginning in November 1991 following the resignation of former Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh.
Barr left the post in January 1993 as President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, installed his own team via the normal cycling of political appointees during a change of presidential parties.
Shortly before Barr left, he helped Bush facilitate the 1992 post-election pardons of six prominent Republican fellow appointees, most of them convicted of serious crimes involving the Iran-Contra scandal.
That scandal is best known because it revealed that Reagan-Bush administration officials knowingly violating a law enacted by Congress forbidding sensitive transactions involving Iran or right-wing rebel groups in Central America known as the “Contras.”
Iran, then as now, was particularly notorious because radical Muslims had seized American hostages during the Carter administration and voiced many anti-American threats.
experience and integrity.
similar investigations. Those probes most notably involve Mueller's ongoing probe Russian influence helping enable Trump's 2016 presidential election victory, among other alleged misconduct or crime.
The case’s drama included the defendant’s tearful apologies for wrongdoing that cost him both his job and threatened his marriage because the FBI exposed how Wolfe, shown in a file photo from an appearance on C-SPAN discussing security issues, had been having an affair with a young reporter.
She said that she would sentence him purely on the charge of lying in his plea agreement, but then said that he deserved jail time in part because he had violated his position of responsibility.
The judge noted, however, that Berger and Petraeus had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, unlike Wolfe.
collaboratively with the CIA and FBI operational arms.
After the family moved to Houston in 1959, Poppy became active in Texas Republican politics. His initial post was as Harris County GOP finance chairman. This enabled him to leverage his financial contacts, and prepare for a losing Senate campaign against Democrat Ralph Yarborough in 1964. Bush aimed lower for his next campaign, and won a Houston congressional seat in 1966. By then a millionaire, he exited from Zapata Offshore by selling his shares to fellow Yale Bonesman Robert Gow.
One of the book's central findings was to document via more than 1,100 endnotes that all recent presidents between President Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump established covert ties to the CIA or FBI before they entered politics.
from the Yale's Skull and Bones Society to helping finance Hitler's chief financier, Fritz Thyssen.
New York Times, 
As Prime Minister Theresa May, right, limped home from Brussels on Thursday with an agreement that seemed to raise the odds of a chaotic no-deal Brexit, ordinary Britons were scrambling to add their names to a largely futile petition to cancel the whole deal — crashing a parliamentary website.
New York Times, 
New York Times, 
Bahrain, which has been accused of torture and other abuses, had used what is known as an Interpol red notice to reach across the world and grab him, despite rules meant to protect refugees.
director of the Justice Integrity Project and the author of Presidential Puppetry, joins S.T. Patrick to discuss presidential politics of the last 40 years. What should we have known about George H.W. Bush, Bill & Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, John Kerry, John Edwards, and John McCain?
Bush and the October Surprise, the Willie Horton ad, The Election of 1992, Ross Perot’s deficiencies, what Fletcher Prouty still teaches us, the legitimacy of Bob Dole’s 1996 nomination, the value of Jack Kemp, Bush v Gore, The Two Johns: Kerry & Edwards, the real John McCain, and much more.
